Occam's Razor: "when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities". I find it MUCH less believable that there was a conspiracy to bomb the Twin Towers and then hide the fact with such an elaborate cover-up. The U.S. government is simply not that competent.

so you'd ignore all the architects, engineers, and physicists based on the notion that you dont think our government is competent?

could it not have been an element within our government, one not visible?

i find the testimony of so many scientists FAR more compelling than "occam's razor."

and do you honestly find the testimony and theories of all these scientists "equal" to the official story? i definitely do not. but i've spent a while reading their essays, and they are extremely compelling, while the official cover story remains the same, and remains unbelievable and fraught with holes and inconsistencies.

That's the thing for me, too. The inconsistencies and the unlikeliness of the official story. I forgot all the physics I learned in school and I STILL was fucking flabbergasted when the towers fell. And I have not ever heard one single thing that supports what happened that day with the destruction supposedly caused by two planes - from the two main towers collapsing to building 7's collapse.

When something doesn't make sense on its own, are people really supposed to just sit back, fold their arms, and go "well, until a likely explanation magically appears witout further inquiry, this shit that doesn't make sense will just be slapped with a 'does TOO make sense!' sticker. Let's move on!"

This incident is why we went to war, twice. This is why thousands of people have been locked up and tortured and sometimes killed, as "suspects" in that third war, the "war on terror." You really think the craziness that followed 9/11 would have been this same amount of crazy if the towers hadn't fallen?

*Some* amount of crazy, yes. It would have been and was a horror show from planes flying into buildings, period. But the total destruction of those two buildings and then the third building that never gets talked about - all of that changed everything.

And none of it makes sense as officially presented.

Hrm. I'm not a mech e or civil engineer of any sort, but we did discuss the mechanics of how the towers could have fallen like that in my foundational engineering classes. I don't find the arguments that there was a bomb compelling. I think it is more likely that the design architects, or even more likely, contractors, screwed up somewhere in the design or building of the towers which made catastrophic failure more likely. Having seen the way the sausage is made, so to speak, all high rises scare the everliving daylights out of me.

no? what about the basement janitor's testimony? what about the basement floors being blown out? from airplanes hitting the top of the building??? what about the recorded seismic events that did not match up with the planes' impact? what about the building falling at nearly freefall speed? what about the pools of molten metal in the basement days later? what about the firemen's testimony on the explosions they heard going off? what about the sequential charges that you can SEE going off just ahead of the collapsing floors all the way down? if you can remember solid rebuttals to these from your class, i'd love to hear them. but man. there are just so many pieces of evidence that at LEAST call for a thorough investigation. why no thorough investigation? if there is nothing to hide, wouldn't we all want a thorough investigation of an event like this? why not?

also, what about all these scientists and engineers? do we really think their word and their daring to take a stand which is sure to be ridiculed is inspired by anything other than an honest conviction based on extensive education and sound hypotheses? if just seeing those buildings come down isn't enough to convince you those were demolitions, then spend a few hours reading these very well accredited scientists' words. i would be surprised if at the end of it one could remain casually skeptical. very surprised.

What I know for sure, after extensive reading and interview watching, is that we do not know the whole story. There is more...and it will be painful to learn. I know what I saw as the South Tower exploded above me and my husband. Over dinner recently, I had a political expert tell me that the planes were allowed to crash into the towers because the military just "screwed up" and was not able to scramble jets in time to prevent the hijacked planes from being forcibly redirected or shot down. I have to laugh as this is the same friend who refers to "liberals" as "squish heads."

exactly, carmen. if nothing else, we know there is much we do not know. any serious examination of the evidence right before us, as well as the in-depth essays collected by these scientists at the very least proves that. given this, the intense avoidance of a true investigation points to a disturbing agenda.

And in my mechanical properties and failure analysis oriented laboratory here at Tech, we passed around and used in class enough structural engineering papers whose analyses of the collapse I find perfectly plausible, if not downright elegant.

I haven't read much of the conspiracy theories or anything that talks about anything other than the buildings and the fire, and you can also cobble up plenty of scientists who say there's no global warming. I'm just saying, based on some very simple (to an engineer like me) failure principles like Euler instability; the load paths of the floors and columns; and the degradation of stiffness and strength brought on by the fire, I have absolutely no problem saying that yes, two giant f'ing cans of jet fuel going 500mph into the towers could easily have brought them down in the amount of time it took them to come down. I think it's a testament to the design that they stayed up as long as they did, because the design pushed the edge of the envelope as it was in terms of load path redundancy and stability.

But what do I know, I can't even finish a PhD in this engineering crap.

i appreciate the input my friend.

there's a link above, architects and engineers for 9/11 truth, and i would love to hear your feedback if you ever have time to read some of those (may written by people who do have the vaunted PhD, if that matters to you, i know i dont have anything close to that, but they made sense to me). i think its safe to say they are not "conspiracy theorists."

and regardless...nothing really answers why the bush admin has gone to so much trouble to prevent the 9/11 commission from gaining info they needed or why there is no investigation into what happened. it's one thing to offer a supposedly plausible explanation for the masses to ingest. but its another to fund a well organized and empowered investigation to ascertain and prove. and the opposite of that has been done. this alone spells plenty of trouble and reason for suspicion. not to mention, again, the seismic event that did NOT match the planes impact, but preceeded it, as well as many of the points i listed earlier.

but i do appreciate you weighing in, being informed in the ways that you are.

I certainly agree a thorough investigation is called for. I'm just not ready to say conclusively that there were bombs in the building. I did read through the site you linked, and while I am sure everyone writing there is in good faith convinced of their beliefs, I tend to be skeptical of most scientists and engineers -- especially since many of the authors of the articles there are not civvies or mech Es. A theoretical physicist, or an EE like me just doesn't have the expertise to make claims about structural loading, mechanical stress, metal fatigue, or any of the thousands of other factors that go into bringing down a building of that size.

Since there are clearly questions, the best thing is to have qualified, non-partisan experts in the proper fields do a thorough analysis.

When I get home from the victory party tonight (yay Potomac primaries!) I'll dig up my old lecture notes and transcribe the relevant bits.

yes, i dont need to agree definitely with anyone on methods, etc. but i think it is evident that an investigation is more than waranted.

plus i really have no doubt. i've seen enough demolitions to recognize them, PhD or not. and buildings simply do not fall down like that naturally, straight into their own footprint. just does not happen. especially with asymmetrical damage! makes no physical sense. unless it was controlled.

i hear you on the potomac primaries!

Re: scrambling the jets. It takes 15 minutes minimum for an F-16 to go from ice cold engine to flight speed. From Langley to NYC is about 400 miles, at the F-16s top speed of 1500mph, that's about 16minutes. So your absolute minimum time to NYC from the nearest air base with fighter jets on standby is 31 minutes.

It is NORAD's job to know exactly where all aircraft are at all times. By most reports, the first flight veered off course at 8:10 and hit the towers at 8:45. That gives NORAD a 15 minute window to make a call on whether military support is needed (since most flights that go off course do so because of engine trouble, sick pilot, or weather or something) in order to get there before the first tower is hit. So, NORAD screwed up there, but I'm not going to call for blood from whoever made the call.

However, at 8:45 the first tower is hit by AA11. By 8:45 at the latest, NORAD knows that a second flight has gone off course, and accounts differ, but in hindsight, NORAD should have realized that a hijacking had taken place.

If they had given the order immediately after being told that UA175 was in trouble, there might have been a chance that jets could have gotten to NYC in time. Maybe.

However, there was no excuse at all for not having F-16s in the air and on standby for potential further attacks, and for not having planes in the air by the time the Pentagon was hit.

Although again, my motto is never to attribute to malice what can be explained by pure dumbassery and incompetence.

and building 7 remains to be explained, even by any sort of "metal fatigue" or anything. and it was not "a building of that size," it was two!

straight down into their own footprints. at nearly freefall speed!

i dont see this as explainable by incompetence, myself. i simply dont see a seismic event that precedes the plane's impact as explainable by incompetence, for one thing. nor the manner of their destruction. i see those as controlled demolitions. "turning to sawdust from the top down." but that's me.

My comment about incompetence was with reference to the generals at NORAD who didn't order F-16s in the air.

gotcha.

I'm generally inclined to agree with atlasien, Capsicum and shelbinator here, that it's really not completely implausible that the towers collapsed on their own. Even if it was unlikely — and I'm not qualified, I admit, to say how unlikely it was or wasn't — unlikely things happen. Lightning from a storm miles away zigzags across an unlikely path of least resistance, because of a strange, temporary alignment of electrons, and hits someone under a clear blue sky, a human being falls tens of thousands of feet from an airplane without benefit of a parachute, bounces, and survives. Hell, the evolution of human beings, period, was as any competent biologist will tell you extremely unlikely, and yet that doesn't somehow damage the credibility of the theory of evolution, or make "intelligent design" a plausible alternative.

All that said, however: Nezua, Joan and Carmen have a strong point as well. There hasn't been, and absolutely should be, a really thorough, careful investigation, with as big an investigative team of experts from every relevant field as possible, unfettered access, subpoena power, and all the time necessary. And there isn't a goddamn thing else that the Bush administration hasn't lied about. So of course there should be a proper investigation; we should get the UN involved if we can, and spare no expense, and get down as close as we possibly can to the bottom of the thing, until we can reconstruct every minute of that day, but I don't think that if such an investigation concludes that, yes: two large jets crashing into the buildings is what caused them to collapse, it will be because the Shadowy Conspiracy Got To Them Too.

(Whoops, looks like the discussion's gone further while I was writing this. Ah well.)

A. Who planned and facilitated the collapse of the twin towers? I personally have to give credit to al Qaeda. It was a brilliant plan. Three out of four very large projectiles hit their targets. That's a pretty good success rate. The attack was nearly perfectly executed, with an impact far greater than any of the masterminds and planners could have imagined.

Is it so far fetched to think that al Qaeda had engineers and consultants who knew the buildings and knew where to hit them? Is it so hard to believe that they ran computer models and simulated the impacts over and over again? Why do all the conspiracy theories I've read point to our government having a hand in it somehow? What it boils down to is al Qaeda won that round.

B. How did the towers fall? The buildings fell and people died just like al Qaeda wanted. I watched TV coverage over and over from all different angles on many different networks. I saw what I saw; the buildings collapsed extremely quickly but it did not appear to me to be like any of the controlled demolitions that I have seen on TV. Al Qaeda wanted maximum loss of life, so they would have detonated demolition shape charges upon impact or immediately after. Why did they wait so long? But if they had planted explosives, then they would have skipped using the planes altogether and just used the demolition explosives.

I suppose the only way to end the "controversy" for some people would be to build full scale models and test each hypothesis. Since that will never happen, this debate will never rest.

Or maybe the towers were crushed by Allah, if you believe that sort of thing.

OR have a real investigation!

Home now, and have looked up my old lecture notes. These are from Spring 02, and are super simplified, since the course was only a sophomore level intro class. Since each tower was hit by one airplane, we looked at a simplified case of one structure, one impact. We made about a zillion simplifying assumptions that are probably not valid in the real world: all welds are ideal joints, all beams follow ideal beam bending laws, all floors are loaded equally prior to impact, and load is distributed evenly across a floor, all supports are ideal trusses. Using properties of steel, and making an educated guess on the speed of the aircraft (600mph, a good bit faster than average cruising velocity for a 767), then in our simplified world, yes, an impact from a 767 could cause a building similar to one of the towers to collapse entirely.

BUT, I will repeat, I am in no way qualified to actually evaluate the towers in the real world. An exercise in an undergraduate engineering class is not the same as a rigorous professional analysis.

yet they purposely built them to withstand such collisions...

Forgive the lack of a link, existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com has a rather long post at the top of his blog on this very subject. Lots of specific detail. Also might want to check out on his blog roll '911:who really did it'. Not a lot of theories, but wow. If that site is posting correct info, there are an awful lot of dual American/Israeli citizens in the Pentagon, the Executive offices and other high places. Personally, I've never bought the official story. Too much stuff that just doesn't add up.

i find what is known and verifiable to be damning enough: that the bush administration had ample warning about a threat posed by al qaeda to commandeer multiple commercial jet aircraft in a terrorist attack, and for whatever reason, took no action. i find it entirely damning enough that they failed to capture bin laden at multiple opportunities. i find it entirely damning enough that an agent of the FBI warned about the known terrorist suspects attending flight schools, to no avail. the list goes on and on.

at this point, the revelation of any complicity by this administration in the 9/11 mass-murder would merely be the noxious icing on a vile cake.

you are right. the list does go on and on.